A Brazilian band who put a ten-string folk instrument next to a Mellotron and an orchestral arranger. This is the record that made their name.

The short version

O Terço formed in Rio de Janeiro in 1968 and had already been through several line-ups by the time they recorded this album at a São Paulo studio between November 1974 and May 1975. It was released on Underground that year. All five members carry vocal credits, and a guest singer appears on one track. Orchestral arrangements are by Rogério Duprat, one of the central figures of Brazilian popular music arrangement. Eight tracks, sung in Portuguese, closing with a piece of over twelve minutes.

A Brazilian instrument in a progressive band

What separates O Terço from their European models is instrumentation. The viola caipira — a ten-string Brazilian folk guitar — is credited to two members here, and it sits alongside piano, organ and synthesizer without either sounding out of place. The orchestral arranger, Rogério Duprat, had been central to Brazilian popular music for a decade, which places the band inside the national scene rather than at its progressive margin. One caution: a Portuguese-language source describes two tracks as instrumental, but the release credits a guest vocalist on one of them, so this page names no instrumentals.

The sound

This is viola-caipira-shaded symphonic prog. The keyboard writing supplies the symphonic weight, Sérgio Hinds’s guitar carries the melodic lines, and the Brazilian folk instruments give the record a colour no European band could have produced. With five singers in the group the vocal arrangements are unusually rich. Duprat’s orchestration is used sparingly rather than as a wash. The whole album has a warmth that the more austere South American progressive records of the period tend to lack, and it is the most immediately likeable of the three covered here.

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The songs

‘Hey Amigo’ opens the album and was issued as a single. ‘Criaturas da Noite’ is the title track and sits near the end of the sequence. ‘1974’ closes the record at over twelve minutes and is by some distance the longest and most developed piece on it. Between them they show a band capable of a three-minute single and a twelve-minute construction in the same forty minutes.

Reception and legacy

An English-language reference source calls this a major success and Brazil’s first classic progressive album, but the article carries a warning that it needs additional citations, so this page reports the description without endorsing it. What is verifiable is the release history: a Chilean edition in 1977 under a Spanish title, an Italian pressing the same year, an Italian CD in 1990, and Brazilian CDs from 1999 onward, one of them pairing this album with its successor. That is a wider reach than most Brazilian rock of the period achieved.

The verdict

This is the O Terço album to hear, and one of the strongest Brazilian progressive records of the seventies. The combination of symphonic keyboards, a national folk instrument and a serious orchestral arranger produces something that could not have been made anywhere else, and the twelve-minute closer justifies every minute. Newcomers to Brazilian prog should start here rather than with the more famous Bacamarte album, which came eight years later and from a different world entirely. Five musicians all credited with vocals, plus a guest singer, makes this the most voice-heavy record in the band’s catalogue.

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